Vista Redux

Just the other evening I purchased a new PC. This PC has Vista Home Premium installed on it, and I was hoping for a better experience with Vista than when I installed it onto my laptop. To my disappointment I saw the blue screen memory error within 15 minutes of plugging the computer in and booting up Vista. Vista didn’t like the D-Link WDA-1320 wireless card I installed in it. After battling that and finding drivers that would work for the card I thought everything would be alright. And then the PC froze. So I rebooted and worked a bit more and the PC froze again. At this point I divided the partition up and installed the 64 bit version of Ubuntu Linux. (I must note this only took about 45 minutes and all of my hardware, including the wireless card work flawlessly in Ubuntu.) I played around in Ubuntu for a couple of hours and did not experience any freezing. So, I ruled out the idea that the hardware was bad. Vista seems to be the culprit.

So this evening I began trying to track down fixes for my Vista freezing issues. I found a number of discussion forums flooded with people having the same problem. And I found two solutions that at this point appear to have resolved my PC freezing issues in Vista.

The Fix
1. Go to Control Panel –> Hardware and Sound –> Power Options –> Choose High Performance
2. Go to Computer –> Right click on all hard disk drives and choose properties –> uncheck index this drive for faster searching

Essentially this stops Vista from constantly scanning your hard drive and prevents Vista from going into any hibernation mode. So far after a few hours I have not experienced a freeze yet in Vista.

But, I think Ubuntu may become my main operating system on this PC. I installed the 64 bit version of Ubuntu and it is blazing fast on this PC, and I won’t need to worry about any Genuine Advantage mixups with Ubuntu. 🙂